Toward Resilient-Communities through Machizukuri on Post-Recovery Disasters: An Analysis of the Social-Ecological Actions in Kumamoto, Japan
Keywords:
Machizukuri, Resilient-Communities, Social-Natural Capital, Disaster Risk Reduction, RecoveryAbstract
In this paper, we employ a social-natural capital analytical framework to empirically characterize the socio-ecological actions conducted by the Japanese model of bottom-up governance, Machizukuri, in disaster recovery. Taking two case studies of disaster occurrence in Kumamoto Prefecture, a salient agricultural Khusyu area, we analyze the Machizukuri movement for the 2016 earthquake and 2020 devastating flooding in semi-structured interviews with six stakeholders obtained by purposive sampling technique. The results revealed that Machizukuri is an essential grassroots function from “city-making” to “disaster recovery.” In addition, Machizukuri is subsumed into two functional types: a) an institution or soft infrastructure, especially in providing community space, and b) a social and volunteer movement. The case of establishing a short-term project activity to reduce disaster, even a long-term project for climate change impacts. In the short-term project, the activity focuses on immediate disaster response and trauma healing, while in the long-term project, the activity highlights museum construction and local people’s economic revitalization, along with engaging natural capital in rice field terraces conduction for flooding and another cascading disaster, landslide to preserve water quality. Consequently, the more-than-human role has significantly reduced disaster risk and mitigated climate change. However, there remains a vivid gap in the earthquake recovery process in which communications between the local government and residents must reduce the controversies of town planning or design to create sustainable cities.
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